The purpose of this research is to understand how the meanings of words and sentences are represented in memory. It is proposed that word meaning consists of descriptions in both an analog and analytic representation. This hypothesis has been tested by examining what kinds of concurrent tasks interfere with the comprehension and with the verification of sentences (deciding whether a sentence is true or false). A visual processing task interfered with the comprehension and verification of sentences requiring imagery, thus indicating that their comprehension involved analog processing. By examining selective interference with word processing in more detail it should be possible to determine details of the analog representation. By examining the selective facilitation of word processing it would be possible to determine details of the analytic representation.